I got this SMS from Airtel today:
Dear customer, Congrats! In appreciation of your long-standing association,we have actvd ISD facility without any additional deposit, w.e.f 23-Nov-05. Thank you
I wish Airtel wouldn’t use SMS-ese in their offficial messages. It’s irritating. But that aside, I’m thrilled I’ve finally got ISD without having to shell out a deposit. I’m on a peculiar plan- it’s a postpaid plan meant for salaried people, but the Airtel sales office offered it to IIMB students. The problem with that is that to activate long distance calls to landlines, or international calls to any phone, you had to deposit your salary slip. Without a salary slip, you had to deposit ten thousand rupees. Ouch.
Anyway, their customer sercive centre calls me every two months or so and tries to sell me an add-on service. I usually decline, but when the call centre would ask if there’s something I’d rather have instead, I used to tell them how irritating it was not to have an ISD facility. Now, they’ve given it to me just for sticking on for fifteen months.
What is now intriguing me is- did they give this freebie to everyone who’s been on for fifteen months, and has paid bills (very substantial bills indeed at one point of time) promptly? Or, did the customer service rep actually flag the fact that I wanted ISD, enter it into their CRM package, which decided that I would like an ISD facility best when it went through the records and saw that I had been on the same connection for fifteen months. What’s more- is Airtel’s data mining smart enough to figure out that if the bulk of someone’s bill comes from national long distance calls, (s)he might be an even juicier prospect for international long distance?
I’m not too sure. Their Karnataka database was pathetic six months ago- the Airtel centre didn’t know how much I had on deposit, how long I’d had roaming, or how long I’d had my connection. My request to terminate roaming vanished into the ether, and I finally did it myself online when they revamped their website (which now works really well). Still, six months is a long time, and maybe they’ve refined their CRM a lot since then.
Does anybody know if this zero deposit on ISD has been offered to more people than me, or about Airtel’s CRM in general? Comment or drop me a line, please.
Posted by Aadisht 
